World News Quick Take

Agencies

Tue, Feb 18, 2014 - Page 7

MEXICO

Federico Campbell dies

Author, journalist and essayist Federico Campbell has died at age 72. The National Institute of Fine Arts in Mexico City said Campbell died on Saturday. He was perhaps best known for his novel Tijuanans, a portrait of Campbell’s native city during the 1930s. Born in 1941, Campbell studied law, literature and philosophy in Mexico City and journalism at Macalester College in Minnesota. He worked as a foreign correspondent in Washington, founded a publishing house and translated works of Harold Pinter and David Mamet. He won the Colima Narrative Fine Arts Prize in 2000 for his novel Transpeninsular. He published nearly two dozen other works of fiction and nonfiction, including novels, short story collections, essays and interviews. The institute did not list a cause of death, but said he had been hospitalized.

TAJIKISTAN

Prison barber kills warden

A prisoner stabbed a prison governor to death with scissors after being ordered to give him a haircut, the Ministry of Internal Affairs said yesterday. The prison governor, 66, “on Sunday evening asked the prisoner, who had worked as a barber before being jailed, to come to his office to cut his hair,” an interior ministry spokesman said. The prisoner then used his scissors to stab the prison governor once in the head and then 16 times in his body. The official died before reaching hospital. The prisoner, 29, is serving a 17-and-a-half-year sentence for murdering a young man, whom he stabbed 57 times.

UNITED STATES

Obama, Barkley talk aging

Like most people of a certain age, President Barack Obama is starting to complain about the aches and pains of getting older. Obama told retired NBA star Charles Barkley in an interview that aired on Sunday that because “things happen,” he was limiting his basketball playing to about once a month. “One is, you just get a little older and creakier. The second thing is, you’ve got to start thinking about elbows and you break your nose right before a State of the Union address,” Obama, 52, said in the interview broadcast on the TNT network before the NBA All-Star Game. Discussing the aging process during an exchange about his signature healthcare reform law, Obama said that being past 50, “you wake up and something hurts and you don’t know exactly what happened, right?”

SPAIN

Man recovers after pot cake

A university student reportedly went into a comatose state early on Sunday after he ate a birthday cake baked with marijuana, while nine others were also hospitalized for irregular heartbeat, Madrid officials said. The comatose man was not responding to stimulus when admitted to a Madrid hospital, but he later recovered, Madrid emergency services spokesman Javier Chivite said. The man was still hospitalized. It was not immediately clear whether the pot cake directly led to the man’s comatose state, or if he had ingested other substances or had underlying medical problems. An official at Puerta de Hierro de Majadahonda hospital confirmed the man went into a comatose state, but declined to reveal further details, citing privacy issues. The hospital official spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to be identified by name. A total of 11 people were affected by eating the cake, Chivite said. Ten of them were hospitalized, the hospital official said.